Temperature And Clock Frequency
As Nvidia showed off the GeForce GTX 1080 at its press day in Austin, Texas, we kept asking ourselves how the card repeatedly showed up in demos at temperatures under 65 °C. In order to circumvent its thermal limit, we tried setting the fan to a 100% duty cycle, and that ended up being the simple solution.
In our standard setup with an ambient temperature of 22 °C, we measured 68 to 69 °C. In another room at 20 °C, and using a less demanding Full HD workload, we finally replicated Nvidia's 65 °C demo. The noise that's created isn't bad when you're in a large hall full of journalists and EDM blaring over the speakers. But it's much more apparent in an office.
And unfortunately, real-world temperatures after three minutes of warm-up look a lot different than what we saw during Nvidia's press day. It doesn't take long for the card to hit its temperature target and hover around 83 to 84 degrees Celsius. That number rises to 85 degrees during the stress test.
Focus on the overclocking run's orange line. At the beginning of our test, we registered a remarkable 2126MHz that finally stabilized at 2088MHz. Running at 1920x1080 not only saves 34W of power that isn't converted to heat, but it also facilitates GPU Boost rates above the 2.1GHz level.
The 1080 hits its temperature target by dropping the GPU's clock rate. During a gaming loop, it falls all the way down to its base frequency, leaving nothing left of GPU Boost. This gets even worse during our stress test, where the core clock dips below the 1607MHz that is supposed to be the GeForce GTX 1080’s floor.
Nvidia's direct heat exhaust cooler does do its job, but the GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition does face clear and restrictive boundaries that make overclocking completely pointless for sustained or challenging loads. Admittedly, the load’s a lot lower if you dial back to 1920x1080. But who buys a $700 graphics card for Full HD?